Effective Visualizations

Now that you know how to create graphics and visualizations in R, you are armed with powerful tools for scientific computing and analysis. With this power also comes great responsibility. Effective visualizations is an incredibly important aspect of scientific research and communication. There have been several books (see references) written about these principles. In class today we will be going through several case-studies trying to develop some expertise into making effective visualizations.

THIS IS A GOOD RESOURCE for BS Statistics

Worksheet

The worksheet questions for today are embedded into the class notes.

You can download this Rmd file here

Note, there will be very little coding in-class today, but I’ve given you plenty of exercises in the form of a supplemental worksheet (linked at the bottom of this page) to practice with after class is over.

Resources

  1. Fundamentals of Data Visualization by Claus Wilke.

  2. Visualization Analysis and Design by Tamara Munzner.

  3. STAT545.com - Effective Graphics by Jenny Bryan.

  4. ggplot2 book by Hadley Wickam.

  5. Callingbull.org by Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West.

Part 1: Warm-up and pre-test [20 mins]

Warmup:

Write some notes here about what “effective visualizations” means to you. Think of elements of good graphics and plots that you have seen - what makes them good or bad? Write 3-5 points.

  1. you dont need to think too much about it, what is being shown is clear
  2. less is more
  3. it doesnt need an explanation
  4. good (not over) use of colours
  5. 1-3 are all the same thing essentially
  6. scales, etc, are meaningful (eg barplot starts y-axis at 0, not some other misleading value)
  7. it doesnt appear on fox news…if it does, it is almost surely misleading.

CQ01: Weekly hours for full-time employees

Question: Evaluate the strength of the claim based on the data: “German workers are more motivated and work more hours than workers in other EU nations.”

Very strong, strong, weak, very week, do not know

  • the x-axis doesnt start at 0, and is misleading (as mentioned above in good/bad plots). it appears as though France is less than half the largest one (or Germany), when in fact it is only a few hours less.

  • main takeaway is dont make shitty misleading plots! or, start axes at 0, when relevant

CQ02: Average Global Temperature by year

Question: For the years this temperature data is displayed, is there an appreciable increase in temperature?

Yes, No, Do not know

  • bad plot again. the years are not labelled either.

  • Main takeaway: the y limits are terrible, and should span the range of the y data

CQ03: Gun deaths in Florida

Question: Evaluate the strength of the claim based on the data: “Soon after this legislation was passed, gun deaths sharply declined.”

Very strong, strong, weak, very week, do not know

  • bad plot, y-axis is reversed. also, the red on the plot looks terrible.

  • Main takeaway: i cant believe this was on reuters! oh ok, it was an accident! that makes more sense then… ah i get it, they were trying to show “more blood”…but that didnt really work out!

Part 2: Extracting insight from visualizations [20 mins]

Great resource for selecting the right plot: https://www.data-to-viz.com/ ; encourage you all to consult it when choosing to visualize data.

Case Study 1: Context matters

Case Study 2: A case for pie charts

Part 3: Principles of effective visualizations [20 mins]

We will be filling these principles in together as a class

Make a great plot worse

Instructions: Here is a code chunk that shows an effective visualization. First, copy this code chunk into a new cell. Then, modify it to purposely make this chart “bad” by breaking the principles of effective visualization above. Your final chart still needs to run/compile and it should still produce a plot.

How many of the principles did you manage to break?

Plotly demo [10 mins]

Did you know that you can make interactive graphs and plots in R using the plotly library? We will show you a demo of what plotly is and why it’s useful, and then you can try converting a static ggplot graph into an interactive plotly graph.

This is a preview of what we’ll be doing in STAT 547 - making dynamic and interactive dashboards using R!

library(tidyverse)
## ── Attaching packages ─────────────────────────── tidyverse 1.2.1 ──
## ✔ ggplot2 3.2.1     ✔ purrr   0.3.2
## ✔ tibble  2.1.3     ✔ dplyr   0.8.3
## ✔ tidyr   1.0.0     ✔ stringr 1.4.0
## ✔ readr   1.3.1     ✔ forcats 0.4.0
## ── Conflicts ────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
## ✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
## ✖ dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
library(gapminder)
library(plotly)
## 
## Attaching package: 'plotly'
## The following object is masked from 'package:ggplot2':
## 
##     last_plot
## The following object is masked from 'package:stats':
## 
##     filter
## The following object is masked from 'package:graphics':
## 
##     layout
p <- ggplot(gapminder, aes(x=gdpPercap, y=lifeExp, colour=continent)) +
geom_point()
p

p %>%
  ggplotly()
# plot_ly
gapminder %>%
  plot_ly(x = ~gdpPercap, y=~lifeExp, colour= ~continent,
          type="scatter", mode="markers")
## Warning: 'scatter' objects don't have these attributes: 'colour'
## Valid attributes include:
## 'type', 'visible', 'showlegend', 'legendgroup', 'opacity', 'name', 'uid', 'ids', 'customdata', 'selectedpoints', 'hoverinfo', 'hoverlabel', 'stream', 'transforms', 'uirevision', 'x', 'x0', 'dx', 'y', 'y0', 'dy', 'stackgroup', 'orientation', 'groupnorm', 'stackgaps', 'text', 'hovertext', 'mode', 'hoveron', 'hovertemplate', 'line', 'connectgaps', 'cliponaxis', 'fill', 'fillcolor', 'marker', 'selected', 'unselected', 'textposition', 'textfont', 'r', 't', 'error_x', 'error_y', 'xcalendar', 'ycalendar', 'xaxis', 'yaxis', 'idssrc', 'customdatasrc', 'hoverinfosrc', 'xsrc', 'ysrc', 'textsrc', 'hovertextsrc', 'hovertemplatesrc', 'textpositionsrc', 'rsrc', 'tsrc', 'key', 'set', 'frame', 'transforms', '_isNestedKey', '_isSimpleKey', '_isGraticule', '_bbox'

Supplemental worksheet (Optional)

You are highly encouraged to the cm013 supplemental exercises worksheet. It is a great guide that will take you through Scales, Colours, and Themes in ggplot. There is also a short guided activity showing you how to make a ggplot interactive using plotly.